Alpha Waves is an early 3D 3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images. Such images may be for later display or for real-time viewing game that combines labyrinthine exploration with platform gameplay The platform game is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles (jumping puzzles). It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps. The most common unifying element to these games is a jump button; other jump mechanics include swinging from extendable arms, as. By most definitions of the genre it could be considered to be the first 3D platform game The platform game is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles (jumping puzzles). It must be possible to control these jumps and to fall from platforms or miss jumps. The most common unifying element to these games is a jump button; other jump mechanics include swinging from extendable arms, as, released in 1990, 6 years before the genre's seminal classic Super Mario 64. It was released one year before Hovertank 3D, which is sometimes incorrectly credited as being the first 3D game on the PC. It provided the first truly immersive 3D experience, combining for the first time full-screen, six-axis, flat-shaded 3D with 3D object interaction (like bouncing on a platform). Alpha Waves was an abstract game with a moody, artistic presentation, curiously named for its supposed ability to stimulate the different emotional centers of the brain with its use of color and music.
It was developed initially for the Atari ST The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals by Christophe de Dinechin, and later ported to the Amiga The Amiga is a family of personal computers sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its impressive graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers, such as the Commodore 64, and the platform quickly and DOS DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is a shorthand term for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition. The DOS port was done by Frédérick Raynal, a notable game designer who would go on to develop Alone in the Dark (often abbreviated AitD), and Little Big Adventure. He has said that his work on Alpha Waves was a major inspiration for AitD.[1][2] The PC version was also localized in North America by Data East Data East Corporation also abbreviated as DECO, was a Japanese video game developer and publisher. The company was in operation from 1976 to 2003, when it declared bankruptcy. Their main headquarters were located in Suginami, Tokyo, The American subsidiary, Data East USA, had been headquartered in San Jose, California, and retitled Continuum. Infogrames Infogrames Entertainment SA was an international French holding company headquartered in Villeurbanne, Lyon, France. It was the owner of Atari, Inc., headquartered in New York City, U.S and Atari Europe. It was founded in 1983 by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet using the proceeds from an introductory computer book. Through its subsidiaries, may have also published their own version in the US under the original title, and it was also released as a part of no less than two Infogrames compilations, on which it retained its original name.
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Gameplay
Alpha Waves is a simple game. It features two main modes of play: Action and Emotion[3]. The core gameplay in both is the same.
Players guide one of six craft (which are little more than geometric shapes in many cases) onto trampoline-like platforms. On these platforms, the player bounces automatically, higher, with each jump, until he reaches the maximum height possible for that platform (some are stronger than others). Every room in the game is a cube In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and of trigonal trapezohedron. The cube is dual to the, and the walls contain doorways leading to other rooms. In this way, players have to work their way through the game's rooms, and reach different areas based on different emotions.
In Action Mode, players also work against the clock. Time bonuses are awarded for entering new rooms, and keys can be collected to open new ways. There isn't a particular end to the game, but the goal is simply to last as long and to discover as much as possible before time runs out. Emotion Mode allows players to explore without time constraints, but players are not allowed to cross certain game boundaries.
Emotion mode was not time limited, and allowed players to explore the game environment freely. While completing the game in Action Mode was very difficult, many players simply enjoyed exploring the game territory in Emotion Mode[4].
Version differences
Alpha Waves was initially released on the Atari ST The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals. This version is notable for allowing two players to compete simultaneously. It lacked music entirely on the Atari 520ST, because of insufficient memory to store the music samples. On Atari 1040ST and later models, the theme song played during the intro. The music was stored on the second side of the floppy disk, since any Atari ST with enough memory also had a dual-sided floppy drive. A promotional version of the program was distributed by a french magazine on single-sided floppy disks, crashing any machine with more than 512K of memory.
The Amiga The Amiga is a family of personal computers sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its impressive graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers, such as the Commodore 64, and the platform quickly port was second. This version added a theme song at the title screen, but nixed the multiplayer aspect. The interface is similar, but the zone select in Emotion has been redone. Beyond this, it is very similar to the original.
The DOS version was the last one, and contains a number of improvements. This version supported AdLib Founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval, Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound cards and other computer equipment. The The company's best known product, the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card , or simply the Adlib as it was called, was the first add-on sound card (on/SoundBlaster sound cards. Despite the fact that these used the more limited FM synthesis of the Yamaha YM3812, compared to the PCM synthesis of the Amiga, Alpha Waves is one of the rare exceptions where the AdLib sound quality is superior. The soundtrack was also expanded to play in-game, and each zone had its own music. Additionally some of the mobiles have been changed, level layouts tweaked, and the camera tilting toned down for easier viewing. The menus and level selection screen have been redone again, and are noticeably enhanced. The DOS version also includes a two player Action Mode (turn-based as opposed to split-screen).
The DOS version lacks a mechanism to regulate speed when played on systems faster than it was intended for (essentially causing it to play in fast forward on newer hardware). However, when played on a properly configured system or emulator An emulator in computer sciences duplicates the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like (and appears to be) the first system. This focus on exact reproduction of external behavior is in contrast to some other forms of computer simulation, which can concern an abstract model of the system being, this can be considered the superior version, for solo play especially.
Technology
File:PC AlphaWaves.png Screenshot from IBM PCOther 3D games of the same era include Falcon (1987), Elite (1984), Starglider 2 (1988), or Hovertank 3D (1991). Alpha-Waves (1990) brought a number of innovations to the 3D gaming experience that make it a significant landmark in 3D gaming[5][6]:
- No visible depth-of-field clipping (objects disappearing in the distance)
- True 6-axis motion and rotation (as opposed to simpler movements in Hovertank 3D for example)
- Large (for the time) number of 3D objects displayed simultaneously
- First gameplay relying primarily on interaction with 3D objects
- No bit-mapped graphics, even the player was drawn in 3D
- Full-screen 3D display, as opposed to 3D occupying a small fraction of the screen.
- First simultaneous 2-player split-screen mode on a single computer (only on the original Atari ST The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals version)
Alpha-Waves ran on 16-bit microcomputers that did not have hardware floating-point In computing, floating point describes a system for representing numbers that would be too large or too small to be represented as integers. Numbers are in general represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16. The typical number that can be capabilities. For that reason, it performed all perspective and rotation computations using only integer arithmetics. In order to avoid using integer multiplications, which were expensive at the time, it described objects using displacements that were multiples of a base vector. For instance, a square in the Z plane would have been described as "+1X +1Y -1X -1Y". As a result, the vast majority of geometric computations were performed using only additions, not multiplications.
The computation of sine and cosines In mathematics, the trigonometric functions are functions of an angle. They are used to relate the angles of a triangle to the lengths of the sides of a triangle. Trigonometric functions are important in the study of triangles and modeling periodic phenomena, among many other applications was similarly done using only integer arithmetic. All angles were represented using not degrees, but 1/256th of a circle. A lookup table In computer science, a lookup table is a data structure, usually an array or associative array, often used to replace a runtime computation with a simpler array indexing operation. The savings in terms of processing time can be significant, since retrieving a value from memory is often faster than undergoing an 'expensive' computation or input/ contained the value of the sine multiplied by 32767. Multiplying this value by a 16-bit coordinate gave a 32-bit value, and the 16-bit high-half of that result was used.
Another key to performance was a highly optimized polygon-filling routine, which used a number of tricks, including an assembly version of Duff's device to achieve a very high fill rate, besting the in-house self-modifying In computer science, self-modifying code is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing - usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code thus simplify maintenance. Self modification is an alternative to the method of 'flag setting' and conditional routine Infogrames Infogrames Entertainment SA was an international French holding company headquartered in Villeurbanne, Lyon, France. It was the owner of Atari, Inc., headquartered in New York City, U.S and Atari Europe. It was founded in 1983 by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet using the proceeds from an introductory computer book. Through its subsidiaries, was using at the time.
The Atari ST and Amiga versions were written in assembly language Assembly languages are a type of low-level languages for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other integrated circuits. They implement a symbolic representation of the numeric machine codes and other constants needed to program a particular CPU architecture. This representation is usually defined by the hardware. The DOS version was written in C C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.
References
- ^ Adventure-eu.com
- ^ http://www.next-gen.biz/magazine/the-making-of-alone-in-the-dark
- ^ http://www.mobygames.com/game/continuum
- ^ http://www.giantbomb.com/continuum/61-2332/
- ^ http://grenouille-bouillie.blogspot.com/2007/10/dawn-of-3d-games.html
- ^ http://www.destructoid.com/the-top-10-most-psychedelic-video-games-ever-26377.phtml
External links
- Continuum at MobyGames MobyGames is a website which catalogs computer and video games, both past and present. The site contains an extensive database of video game information. The website's goal is defined as the following by the website's FAQ: "To meticulously catalog all relevant information about electronic games on a game-by-game basis, and then offer up that
- A video of the game
- Atari ST original source code
- History of Alpha Waves
Categories: 1990 video games | 3D platform games | Amiga games | Atari ST games | DOS games Categories: Games on Microsoft platforms | DOS software | PC games | Video games by platform | Video games developed in France
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